Chapter 10
Once Akira armored up she decided to go to the lounge for a bit of a trial by fire, as she put it. Sparrow took advantage of the opportunity to duck into one of the crews state rooms and put on his new armor.
It was heavy, probably at least as heavy as the armor he had been wearing, and it was a wildly different design. It felt good, however, and the weight really had no effect on him so he just called it a win.
When he left there he headed back to the bridge. He let Kitten know the armor was available and where it was. She told him she would go put it on immediately because her current armor was crushing her chest. Sparrow blushed and headed back to the lounge.
“That new armor looks good on you Sparrow.” Jith said as he entered.
“Thanks, it’s very comfortable and I really like this design.”
“They hired a new designer for the project, that’s why its so different than previous versions.”
“It was an excellent hire.”
They sat around in the lounge discussing how the battle group find might be handled for a while until he was contacted by the bridge again. This time they were approaching the point where Sabine should meet them.
He headed to the bridge and “supervised” them docking their shuttle to one of the dorsal hatches, which basically meant he stood there and listened.
Once they’d docked he headed to the hatch, and met Jith and the others there as well. The hatch opened and Sabine was standing there in full armor with helmet. Behind her was a togruta female, he was extremely shocked to see it was Lady Ahsoka Tano! She was supposed to be dead!
JIth seemed shocked as well but she recovered quickly. “Sabine, it is good to see you again. Lady Ahsoka, welcome. Please follow me to the lounge and we will brief you both on what’s happening.”
Sparrow noticed that when the two ladies spotted Boba they both tensed a bit. Not a surprise since he had never been a friend of the rebellion.
Once they were again seated in the lounge Jith ran through the situation with the Bo clone again. She stressed that the Legion members had found the clones and brought them to her. Sabine was the one to ask the obvious question.
“Why? Why bring it to the Mandalorians? What is in this for you?”
Everyone present had already figured it out anyway so Sparrow saw no reason to lie. “The legion is the code name we operate under but I am from Jith’s culvert. When I saw Bo’s face on that clone I knew it was serious enough to risk our cover.”
Sabine had been around long enough by now to suspect there was more to this story, and a look sideways at Ahsoka let her know she did too. It would be a matter of time before they figured out if they weren’t being told the rest because of them, she looked over at Boba and Fennec, or because of the other guests.
Sparrow spoke again, “The part we can’t wrap our minds around, even all of us together, is why someone would have the ability to clone the mandalore herself and would use it for such a pointless purpose.”
Ahsoka spoke up, “To me that seems obvious, since it would make no sense for someone to use the mandalore in such a way is it not likely that our cloners do not know who she is?”
That shocked them all, none of them had considered something so simple. Bo was an attractive female, after all, Sparrow supposed it could be just that simple.
“Now I feel like an idiot for sounding the alarm and bringing you all in on this, it turns out this may not be some major galactic crisis after all.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Sabine threw in, “Sooner or later our cloners would have found out who she is, and then we would be dealing with a worse mess most likely.”
“Regardless, we are here, and we are ready to deal with it now. Anyone who can create clones just to be used as sport animals deserves to fall anyway.” Boba threw in.
“Good point.” Agreed Caleb.
“Commander, our next patient is waking up if you want to head to the med-bay.”
‘Very well, on my way. You coming Akira?”
“Sure thing.” She said, “later Mom.” To Jith.
As they walked away down the corridor they could hear the rush of comments. Akira seemed completely unbothered though. He just kept staring at her until she finally turned her head to face him and said, “distraction.”
As expected “CJ” was up by the time they reached him and reported no issues. Now all that were left were the three personalities lifted from Omni to wake up.
After a brief conversation making sure he was OK and having given the new crewmember his own set of the lighter weight armor, Sparrow exited the med-bay only to almost collide with Ahsoka.
“Lady Ahsoka.” He bowed his head slightly.
“Commander Sparrow.” She nodded back. “Why do I feel like there is a great amount going on here that we are not being told?”
“Because there is.” He said openly. “Now is not the time to fully unburden ourselves.”
“I take it we will discuss matters in more detail later?”
“I certainly hope too. I could use some advice.”
“For now then, could you please introduce me to your flight crew? They feel very strange in the force.”
“I’ll just bet they do.” He agreed.
He led her to the bridge and introduced her to Omni and Deux. She looked at them strangely and then back at Sparrow with a raised eyebrow. He smiled.
“Guys, Ahsoka is a force user, I am sure she can feel that you aren’t quite what you seem. And where’s Domi?”
“Domi is still in the med bay watching over our latest crewmembers.” Omni volunteered.
“Go ahead and show her, I can feel her curiosity from here.” Sparrow said with a grin.
Deux slid himself out from beneath the helmet of the droid and perched on its shoulder. The little metal ball formed an arm and hand. “A pleasure to meet you.” He said.
She gave a chuckle, “a pleasure to meet you too little one.”
“Now you know why the force feels strange around them. They drive the droids somehow from the inside.”
“Where do they come from?” Ahsoka asked.
“Another galaxy.” He responded.
“I was captured in an imperial lab, and met these fellows and Kitten, who came here from another galaxy. That’s really how this whole adventure started. Everyone over there was engineered to be perfect so this crazy scientist they had made a virus or something that turned a 17 year old short, skinny Zabrak into this.” He gestured down at himself. “The problem is that he didn’t put in an off switch. Every time my blood touches another living organism the process repeats.”
“I see the danger but why hide so much? Surely you can trust people not to mess with that kind of danger.”
“They had a ship Ahsoka, these folks did. From their universe, it was the size of a medium shuttle and it cored an imperial star destroyer like an apple with one shot from whatever weapon it used.”
“Particle Beam Cannon.” Omni helpfully supplied.
“So I am sure the empire is hunting us for that tech and, thanks to the doc at the lab, they know this face as well.”
Ahsoka took it all in for a moment, then she asked, “Why have you shared all this with me.”
“I know what you have done for my people on Mandalore and I have heard of some of your work with the rebellion. My friends here are all but immortal, if me and my crew fall, they will need someone to go to for aid. That will be you.”
“I will help where I can, but I’m not sure how much that will be.”
“It is done then, now we need to handle this clone issue so we can get back on the trail of a cure for us.”
He led her back to the lounge and they worked on the plan with the rest of the team until it was time to contact the cloners. He had already planned this out before he gained his new allies, so the initial contact was done by Omni.
Omni placed the call from the ships comm and it was picked up by a strange looking creature. It appeared to be mainly human but the top of it’s head had a metallic cap that had indicators flashing in various patterns. The eyes were metallic as well, with camera lenses in place of pupils.
“Arkanian vessel Grand Rebirth, how may I be of assistance?” The person/thing said in a robotic, monotone voice.
“It’s me.” The image of Tishk Jorr replied. “Let your bosses know I have another group of trade items.”
“Please wait.”
A harried looking Bo Katan came on the screen next, although this one also had the strange skull cap. It was a disturbing sight, to say the least. In the lounge there were several loud intakes of breath and sounds of distress from where the attack group was watching.
“Captain Jorr, I see you have returned ahead of schedule. This is good as the Masters have used up the previous stock already.” She/it said in a monotone voice.
This wasn’t good, Sparrow had hoped to conduct a rescue.
“Well, good stock is not easy to come by,” The Trandoshan appeared to say, “we might need to re-negotiate our fee.”
“Negotiation is always permitted.”
“So, are you going to give me coordinates?”
“Query submitted to main control, wait one.”
Sparrow saw Ahsoka starting to smile and asked, “What Ahsoka, you seem to be happy all of a sudden.”
“I just realized why our Arkanians chose a CIS ship. Early on they were equipped with the control computers for the droid army. It seems these arkanians tried to save some credits in computer hardware but ended up making a mistake, if we can get to that computer we can severely hamper, possibly even negate, their ability to resist.”
“I am sure we can discover a way to get either Omni or Deux onboard and they can use their computer skills to take over. You just happen to have a person onboard who is intimately familiar with where the computer core is located.”
Deux started conversing with Sparrow on their private channel and eventually the other two synths, along with everyone connected to the synth network joined in. To the others in the lounge it just seemed like a long pause but feverishly a plan was developed, fleshed out, and decided upon. Sparrow didn’t really like it, to be honest, it seemed to be taking some risks he would rather not. The deciding factor, though, was if this plan worked it would solve several very thorny issues he and his crew had, at least until a permanent solution to the gene editor was discovered.
He looked around at the others who had been in the conversation, and all gave a brief nod. It was time.